


Hammered Hearts

by RawWriting



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Comics), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Alcoholism, Bucky is a PLATONIC soulmate, Grief, Half Native Bucky, Historical Reference, M/M, Native American/First Nations History, Soulmate AU, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, War Crimes, blood mention, but is a soulmate, loosely based on 1872, mentions the US attacks on Natives, off screen character death, the trail of tears, younger bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 03:36:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16485215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RawWriting/pseuds/RawWriting
Summary: Gift for the Halloween Stony exchange. Tony Stark made the most incredible weapons the world had ever seen. Unfortunately he learns far too late his own country is the villain in this story.He has blood on his hands, seeped into his soul- but somehow, it takes this blood being literal before he once again feels enough to create anything.Told from Tony's POV, with disjointed and hypomanic edging, at the tail end of a 2 day blacksmithing bender on top of detoxing from alcohol. Please do what you need to for self care.





	Hammered Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PjCole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PjCole/gifts).



> Was a wild ride- had my HD physically break midway through this- so the first 1k-ish words was all that was saved due to being emailed to myself. So the fic has some funky editing as a result. 
> 
> Written to this music list- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2tI68UYJv0&start_radio=1&list=RDj2tI68UYJv0&t=4
> 
> All hail Audiomachine and Two Steps From Hell

 

Tony let the hammer strike the red hot metal again. His heart was pounding still, and if he stopped, the shaking of his hands would make him scream. Four hundred women, children, true innocents, in every way, between just three of the dozens of massacres he knew of. Tens of thousands of bison. An entire way of life, THOUSANDS of people starving, dying because of him.

He breathed out through his nose, jaw clenching, his gorge rising in a copper tang that left him glad there was nothing but bile and booze to come up.

He hammered through the nausea, and he sweated out the booze another drop at a time. The air was hot, a fetid stench of rancid sweat, of booze burning out of him mixing with dried old rusty blood. He worked the metal, shaping it a shame, a death, a sin at a time. His eyes watered from the fumes as he plunged the metal into the water, steam billowing up alike fog from the lake near his childhood home.

Anthony Stark had built weapons the world had never seen before. The smoothest action, the easiest reloading. The best accuracy. Explosives. Canons. Guns. Rifles. He built the repeating fire guns that shredded horses, men, children and bison alike. He built the weapons that even now, were being used to slaughter.

He built them. He sold them. And he did so, feeling _righteous_.

He would never scrub the story of Sherriff Rogers brother out of his mind. Could never. That Rogers had been saved by the man, a boy at the time, had learned so much of how he worked from them... had opened his eyes, to how the savages... were people. Too little too late. He could not stuff the genie back in the bottle.

Oh, how Tony felt a fool. How Tony felt the sins of every lauded “victory”. How he dug into the reports, how he had sought anything to disprove the halfblood liar, instead finding only the damnation of ever more proof. Now he had his sins laid bare, an accounting he could not turn away from in any measure...

It had been, too much. He had drank, to ease the pain. He had drank to ease his shame. He had hidden in his bottle, while a boy young enough to be his son, and a man who looked like goodness and sun made human, tried to fix his mess. Tried to fight Andrew Jackson’s legacy. Tried to fight the criminals that were hailed as heroes.

And the man that facilitated it- the son of the man that supplied Andrew Jackson himself, that had funded these horrors before- sat drinking in a dark smithy with cold ashes where a heart once stood. Useless and worthless like the still and quiet ruins of his heart. Instead of doing something- he had let the world pass him for a full year of wallowing, would still be wallowing in drunken stillness, or dead if not for the events of the day before yesterday.

That heart was beating with determination now. It was rebuilt with those desperate eyes that grew dim staring into his own. It was reinforced with the bubble of air through thick red blood and no words to be heard.

His heart was no longer ash. His body was no longer flesh. The boiling print of blood on his chest, over his heart, would never wash away, for he could feel it sunk into his very soul. Could feel his sins radiating from it to pulse through him, the molten lead where blood should be in a man.

It was refined by blue eyes, no condemnation, just grief. Just horror and anguish. It was fueled, by the compassion, in the other print.

It was honed, by the hand that had sat on his shoulder. By the tears that Tony could never shed. By the Brooklyn drawl, that comforted him even as the speaker was grieving the loss of his best and most trusted friend, the brother he had loved longer than anything else in his life.

Tony pulled the curving metal out, staring at it, before setting to finishing it.

By the time the leather was finished and the stain set- by the time the shield was complete, his hands shook as his vision waivered. His sweat was clean of booze, and his body felt heavy as lead and like it was hollow at the same time.

When the door opened, he didn’t even really look up.

He was too exhausted, too empty.

“Oh, Tony.” Steve breathed, coming into his space, hands, clean of the blood of Bucky, of the lifeblood of a boy that died to save Tony’s life, despite how it would, could never be half as important as the boy-man whom Tony had cost everything. Including now, his very life.

Tony stared at the hands guiding him to the bath. “How can you stand to touch me?” He was tired enough, empty enough to ask. He didn’t really expect an answer. He did as guided, easily, no resistance left in him.

“You may stink, Tony, and- you may be still covered in blood... but you need me.” Steve said softly. The gentle tone left Tony rubbed raw. He didn’t deserve pity.

He didn’t deserve kindness, especially. “I need a good hard boot to the ass- a punch to the teeth. You of all people-“ Steve barked at that, though his hands didn’t become harsh, “Won’t have you telling me _how I should feel_. You want to pay penance? Then you pay me the courtesy of shutting up, and opening those ears of yours.”

Tony fell silent, and the hot water from the tank over the forge clanked and rattled the pipes. The steaming water made the soap flakes stir and swirl as they melted, easily letting Tony get lost in watching them sprinkle from hands unscarred. Hands that belonged to a clear conscious.

The air was filled with the witch hazel and herbs that Bucky had used in making them. That Steve always smelled of. Tony didn’t comment that Steve brought his own. He didn’t fight being shoved into the slightly too hot water or the scrubbing of his body.

“I shut up- hard to listen if you don’t talk.” Tony prodded, the suprasensual side of himself boiling up like some sick pervert in a new dirty novel like _Venus in Furs_. He was become Gregor, if only emotionally.

Steve doesn’t snap back at him, and doesn’t let it stop him cleaning Tony as if he were some toddler that got into mud. But as Tony can’t muster the energy to really care, let alone do it himself, it goes without mention.

Steve’s voice is nearly jarring, after nothing but his own thoughts for so long. “You always blamed yourself. And while Bucky was sometimes mad at you. Sometimes furious at you, he never begrudged that you honestly did not know. It was your actions after you knew, that made him the maddest. It was how you shut us out.” Tony looks down at the blue and red on his own wrists, at the matching red on Steve’s, with gold his own match on the other wrist.

The phantom feel of the other matching golden one throbbed on his chest despite there being bare skin where he felt it. Where that mark had condemned him as it pressed to him, where it burned into his chest to never leave as the hand pressed there went slack.

Tony swallowed again. “You had each other.” He reasoned, the argument old and worn in his own head.

Steve snorted “We were platonic, Tony. He was a child when we met. A man to his people, but a child to ours. You know this. We both talked of this with you. And you needed us... and we needed you. Despite how you shoved us away, that never changed.” Tony’s gorge rises, that horrible nausea and choking feeling returning.

Nothing could fix this hole inside him. Nothing could fix the deaths he caused. The thirst he felt, the need to crawl into the bottle again grew as everything began to hurt again. As the sheer size of his sins as a whole, of all that he had allowed to happen, piled up again.

Steve’s hands moved to Tony’s wrists. Pressing over the soul marks, over the connections that anchored their fates as intertwined, that said they, somehow, in some way- belonged together.

Tony felt that coiled burning ache behind his lungs, itching and scratching under his eyes. It was all he could feel, as it just kept growing, constricting his lungs and leaving his jaw clenching. “He’d be alive without me.” Tony spits, stomach roiling.

Steve doesn’t deny it, doesn’t agree with it, instead he replies, “And I would be dead without you. Your guns, saved my life, at least a dozen times.” It was said so mildly for all that there is that familiar rebuke and sass under it.

Needling him. Asking for better from him. Steve did not let go of the marks, did not bruise the wrists or let go- just holding on. Tony waivered. And like the man he was, Steven took the opening. “It was never about what was behind us, Tony. You focus on the past, and you will never live again. I can do this alone. I don’t want to. And you don’t want me to.”

Tony looks up at that. “You built me that shield. I know you did. But you also had refined more metal. Far more than I could or would want. You have half a man assembled in there. You know, as well as I do- we were never made to be idle. We were never made to wallow. Tony, we were made, forged together, to come to this moment. To make this choice together.” Steven’s hand on his cheek, rough with stubble, pulling him to meet those eyes like skies too clear to look at for long.

Eyes Tony dreams of, has dreamed of since puberty and long before he met his soulmate. “We have so much to Avenge, Tony, but we have so much to build, too. Together. Don’t make me go fight alone. Because that is all I can do alone. Fight. Keep fighting till I can’t any more.” Tony felt a weight in the air, a heaviness that left him breathless, left him working to draw in air.

“Tony, say you will join me- that you want this. Please.” Steve asks it softly, searching Tony’s face, and Tony, can’t deny him. Not with how his heart hammers, with how he can feel the pulse in both wrists, can feel the phantoms of those hands- not on his wrists but on his chest and shoulder. He swears- those touches- are what marked his soul, echoing back to his birth.

The choking tension in his lungs breaks, and the scratchy itch in his eyes resolves into fat drips, but he can not make his voice work, for all he tries. So it only makes sense to lean that last half foot between them, to press lips, salty and wet, to their match, to the lips he has dreamed of and never allowed himself.

“We may not be able to save the world, but we can rebuild it.” Tony finally manages, his own hands twisting in Steve’s hold, palms from both sets of hands covering the other’s soulmarks.

Finally, the connection cements itself. Finally, in their minds- the huge, aching blankness where the other should be, is alive and whole. And if they both are missing the other connection, it only makes them cleave that much tighter. The press of lips becomes a clash of teeth, water splashing and clothes torn off as they head to the bed.

The first rays of light find them, naked and curled together, their soul marks now raised and thick. Tony traces them, ideas for the armor, for a suit of golden yellow wreathed in red, to match the red and blue on Steve’s shield. They were never going to have Bucky in their bond, but they would also never be without his touch, without his influence. A little brother to one, and a teacher to another.

When Tony and Steve take down Fisk, it is only the beginning. By the time they are done rooting through the corruption of their territory, there are a dozen more disenfranchised, rebels and warriors with causes and a passion as deep as theirs. The Avengers.

A family, with Tony and Steve at the helm- guiding and shaping them together, each taking up the slack for the other without thought of when to step up, dancing as naturally together as any ballerina could dream of.

If their hands strayed to each other, and their lips lingered in kisses, perhaps, it spoke to their closeness. Or perhaps it spoke to how they both know- with absolute certainty, how much the other means to them. For how close they both came to losing the other, before they ever came together. One to the bottle and inner demons, and one to the violence of man against itself.

**Author's Note:**

> It's no where near as big or fancy as I wish it was- if there is enough interest and desire, I may come back and do more in depth moments, but this works to keep it PG-13. 
> 
> YES Venus in Furs and suprasensual are references to being masochistic. The concept was not new, but the term Masochistic comes from the author of that 1870 book. Tried to keep the fic in the teen range- but if I do expand it, the rating will likely rocket up rapidly. 
> 
> For those that want to horrify themselves, the referenced Native massacres happened, as did literally thousands of Buffalo poisoned or gunned down just to starve Natives. Tony has some very real guilt from his part in these "Victories". 
> 
> Bucky being Native was used as a kludge to allow both white characters to realistically see through the mountains of propaganda of the 1690s-1870s that would have them seeing Natives as "savages" or worse.  
> I want to acknowledge this as lazy writing on my part- I should have fleshed his character out more, however this is a Stony fic- and I frankly didn't have time to get all the details I wanted in.  
> Be a better writer than me. :P


End file.
